De-clutter your mind to give you space to slow down. Part 1: Capture.

I am going to start a new mini-thread over the next few posts about how you can start to organise your mind to move from being “Hare-Brained” to “Tortoise-Minded”.

(I have just realised, in all the excitement about moving to this new site that I never finished up the series about “How to Be Slow In A Fast Environment”! I will get back to that next week – or may finish it up as a podcast if I am feeling adventurous!)

The reason for this mini-thread is that often people give me the excuse (and it is an excuse) that they have FAR TOO MUCH TO DO to be able to slow down (as I have already started to mention here).

However, it is not how much they have to do that causes them to be think they are far too busy, but the way they think about what they have to do!

The major thing that I have noticed is that they don’t record, write down or capture what they are thinking they need to do. So it just runs round and round and round and round in their heads. They repeat the same list over and over again (often in a different order each time) giving the impression that they have much more to do than they actually have!!

So, the first thing you need to do is just write everything down. But let me just stress one thing: This isn’t about writing a “to do list”, at this stage all it is about capturing what you think you need to do.

Often, when I get clients to do this they cannot list anywhere near as much as they think they should be able to and will say thing like “I am sure I have more to do than that, I must have forgotten some stuff…”. This is rarely true and often you will find you have much less to do than you think you need to.

Next time I will tell you what to do with that capture list!

Matt

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